WEEKLY WARNING WORDS
April 27,2005 - Week 84 - History?
BY DR. BRUNO J. KEITH
Wunderbar! Wir haben einen Pabst - blue-ribbon. As an 18-year-old Hitleryouth he looked so attractive when he tried to shoot down an Allied airplane. He "deserted" his airforce after Hitler committed suicide & continued his priestly education like a good Bavarian beerologist. Was his seminary, like a hundred others, convents & monasteries also abused by hiding top Nazi war criminals in cassocks until Pope Pius XII's creatures could send them to Argentina, Brazil & Chile, via Franco's Spain when the traffic by way of the Vatican became too obvious? We may know the answer if Ratzinger - Benedict XVI - makes Pius XII a saint, according to the heart-wish of our late Polish Pope. Two "p's" in the same pod, pot or plot. That is the crux as we saw it a thousand times on T.V. so recently, crossing themselves & crucifying others.
Such confused & confusing recent history helps to diffuse, or refuse, reliance on ancient history as irrelevant. For faith in it & in its faith trumps anytime known facts. Still, we historians remain curious as to all that really is, was & truthfully happened even when faith-full, true believers hide possible or disproving "details" which might embarrass some co-believers who don't mind sharing the good with the bad in their own background.
Should exacting historians all agree with John Woytola if he declares in one of his books the Bible to be true history? He also shares with orthodox Jews the certainty that the first five books came directly from God although he leaves the old testamenters behind when he equates Jesus with God & adds the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost, to construct a Christian Trinity.
Historically, it has not yet been factually established when this differentiation, or divergence, took place. If historians & other scientists were finally allowed to see, investigate & analyze the documentation of the existence of Jesus Christ, negativists could be convinced of the true Truth of the life, work & complications of a great, holy & successful life & death of the greatest maker of history. Otherwise, we have only the beginnings of Christianity & all its documentation from about 2 ½ centuries after His birth, regardless of the thousands of novels, real masterworks & the belief of the billions since that "Time of Change".
Personally, I cannot forget that, before World War II, I was shown 3 places where Job, an interesting sufferer in the Land of Uz, lived & equally many spots where the Prodigal Son returned to his family, or where the merciful Samaritan was so helpful in spite of Jesus Christ's verification that the 2 latter were not existing but imagined ideas of His parables. Might not the books of Ruth, Job & all the others be beautiful parables, teaching aids, fables, hilarious anecdotes, clever enigmas, pious cracks, ingenious masquerades, malicious "rumors", social gossip or even elaborate appeals to prejudice, passion, white lies, smart rejectionism, outrageous exaggeration, liberal indulgence, ostentatious metaphors, cheap similes, vivid images, sham semblances, friendly jokes, age-old adages, cynical ironies, phony epigrams, legendary euphemisms, saturnine carpings & monolithic, crowd - pleasing subtleties? Each word, phrase, sentence & paragraph would contain its own inner variance of truth.
Considering these mazes of possibilities, we must not smile & mock when the Hebrew word for "young girl" was rendered in Greek & Latin as "Virgin". The Prophet Micah belabored the story of King David's birth in Beth Lehem, the House of Bread (wheat): While good Gospels insist that not David's descendant, Joseph, fathered Jesus, but that the Holy Spirit did. If that is the explanation of the Trinity, God has, indeed, a family of One & One plus Something else.
God's frequent reminder, in the Old Testament, that He called His son, Israel, from Egypt, was Christianized as the Holy Family's escape from the wrath of King Herod, & their return followed this King's death. Samson's dedication to be a Nazarite (his hair never to be cut) lent itself to making the village of Nazareth the domicile of Joseph, Mary with their sons and daughters. The sons were all registered by names, but the girls of the Jesus family remained nameless in truly man's fashion.
But even if the Gospels cannot agree on the many strange or rare circumstances, not even on the time of the Last Supper, the Jewish Seder Feast, & the Sanhedrin's possible, but prohibited, meeting, arrest & execution on a high holiday, the entire beginnings of Great Love & greater curse might be rooted in the mind, creativity & writing hands of a Greek monk-like character.
We agree that great Greeks were the originators of Western culture. But their philo-sophia, love of wisdom, or creative pride, would not allow them to admit that they got their Semitic alphabeth, & thereby their literacy, not from the Phoenicians, who were well-served by their slaves, but from the Jews, the only nation of old which was commanded by law, The Law, that every boy could & should learn to read, to study & master an unknown degree of literacy.
Alexander, the Macedon King of the world, acknowledged it, as had done his Persian predecessor, Cyrus. His more savage successors of Greater Syria & newer Egypt hated Jews for their advanced though formal civilization & mistreated them. They tried to mock the civil & military resistance of the tiny Jewish entity. But their rage became most militant, more relentless & very, very cruel when the few remaining thousands won a few battles & dared to survive.
The Romans treated Jewish slaves & their God most cruelly, but since Rome and other towns of Italy & Sicily were said to be founded by Greek colonialists, there was a feeling of likeness & great respect for Greek treachery & classicism. Leading Romans spent some formative years in subjected Greece. Assumingly, good Greek slaves made good teachers & spoiled teachers remained willing slaves.
Thus Greeks could often get away with lies which were hurtful to fellow slaves, especially in Athens, Rome & Alexandria. They often made a good intellectual trade by inventing Jewish meanness, their selfishness & their assumed hatreds of non-Jew's; Alexandria was & remained the hotbed of hatred for & accusation of Jews, their superstitions & their tendency of rebelling even against the greatest military power of the first few centuries.
It is possible that learned Greeks had heard of the teachings of love by Rabbi Hillel who left the Babylonian exile before Jesus's supposed birth, to be allowed to use his wonderful one-liners in a poor village near former Israel's coast. They transformed him into a wonderful, wandering lecturer & expanded his lessons to be contradicted by self-fulfilling hatred of his own people. But it took more than 2 centuries to fill free wisdom with rigid dogmas which, eventually, gave birth to a new religion which gave some freedom to men-slaves but not to women. Emperor Constantine freely used his mother's & wife's Christianity to win great victories. His council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.(!) established the basic doctrines of Christianity at ever more cost to the Jews. What followed was a history of power & perpetual persecution.
Week 85- May 4, 2005 - - One More Time